Family touch has helped lift hockey player Chu

Published 12:30 am, Sunday, December 27, 2009

Family members of Julie Chu, US Hockey Olympian, had the Olympic rings and Julie's number tattooed on their bodies before the 2002 Olympics. Julie's family from left to right are, mother, Miriam, Julie, sister, Christina Gargulo, and father, Wah.
Photo: B.K. Angeletti

Family members of Julie Chu, US Hockey Olympian, had the Olympic rings and Julie's number tattooed on their bodies before the 2002 Olympics. Julie, her mother, and sister had their ankles tattooed; her brother and father had their arms tattooed.
Photo: B.K. Angeletti

FAIRFIELD -- Julie Chu was becoming a blip on the women's hockey radar screen in the early days of 1998 when her father made an unusual promise.

"If you ever make the Olympic team," Wah Chu said, "I'll get a tattoo on my arm."

Julie was practically speechless.

"I looked at him like he was crazy," she said. "This is the same guy who said that we could never get tattoos in the first place and he's saying he'd get a tattoo."

Chu was just beginning a stellar career with Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford and had already won three USA Hockey Girls' National Championships with the Connecticut Polar Bears. Within a year, she would be playing with the USA National Under-22 team, and a year after that, she would win a silver medal in her first Four Nations Cup tournament.

Suddenly, Chu's dream of making the Olympic team was very real. So was Wah's tattoo promise.

"Now, 2002 rolls around (Chu had just been selected to the Olympic team) and he comes over and goes `Ow, Ow, Ow,' and I go `What's wrong?' And he goes, `I'm just getting ready for my tattoo,'" Julie Chu recalls. "And I was like, `You're actually going to follow through with it?'"

He did. But so did Julie, her mom, Miriam, her brother, Richard, and her sister, Christina. The guys got their tattoos -- the five-color Olympic rings with Chu's No. 13 underneath -- on their arms while the girls got theirs on their ankles.

"First of all, I'm a chicken. Anything with needles, usually I scream before it even touches me," Miriam said. "But no, it didn't hurt. Actually, it pinched. I couldn't look at it while they were doing it, though. But that was it. It wasn't bad and afterwards I was glad we did it."

The Chus have been doing this kind of family thing ever since Julie can remember. If Richard had practice for something, everyone went. If Christina was cheerleading or Julie was playing hockey with the Polar Bears, everyone went. It didn't matter. If someone was involved with something, the whole family went to watch.

"We had always made commitments with our kids, no matter what they do, we would be there for them. Whether it be soccer or hockey or whatever, we made it a family event," Wah Chu said. "It didn't just benefit the individual kid, it benefited the entire family, being close to each other."

Each family member even has a piece of engraved jewelry as a reminder of that family commitment. It reads: "Commitment -- do the best in everything we do. Honor -- do the right thing for ourselves and those that we touch. Unity -- support each other in fulfilling those commitments.

The first letters spell out CHU.

And in just over a month, the entire family will gather in Vancouver to see Julie compete for the United States in the Winter Olympics. It will be the third Olympic Games for Chu, 27, who won a silver medal in Salt Lake City in 2002 and a bronze in Torino, Italy, in 2006. (Yes, the Chus were there for those Games, too).

But they've also been to China, Finland, Germany, Sweden and all over Canada and the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of miles. But for the Chus, it's totally worth it, as it is for Julie.

"For me, I'm so fortunate to have my family there. I think that them being able to take the time and have the financial (means) to see me play in Finland or go to China or even Minneapolis, all these trips take a lot of time off their busy schedules," Julie said. "To have them there and have their support and knowing that if I play well or play poorly, they're going to come up and give me a big hug, I think that means more to me than anything."

Lots of planning

So far, in this 2009-10 national team schedule and "Quest Tour" -- it will stop at Quinnipiac's TD Bank Arena on Jan. 3 for a game against the ECAC All-Stars -- Wah and Miriam have been to St. Paul and St. Cloud, Minn.; Victoria, British Columbia; Spokane, Wash,; Finland (for the Four Nations Cup); Durham, N.H.; Denver; and Calgary, Alberta. There are stops still to come in St. Paul, Ottawa, Madison, Wisc., and Minneapolis before the trek to Vancouver's Olympics.

"It's all about planning. I started planning for this about a year ago," said Wah Chu. "We get advance notice on a lot of things, so it hasn't been a challenge from that point. But there's no special consideration (regarding tickets for player's parents) and it was a little nerve-wracking because the day the (Olympic) tickets went on sale, the system crashed. There were three of us (Wah, Christine and Miriam) working on our computers for two hours trying to get tickets. There was a quota because you could only get a certain number of tickets. We all got through eventually and got our quota of tickets."

One of the most memorable trips came last year when Wah and Miriam traveled to Harbin, China, to see Julie in the 2008 World Championships. Wah had been born and raised in Hong Kong before coming to the United States when he was 16 years old in 1968 and had never been back to his homeland. The couple spent three amazing days in Hong Kong, and as they were in the airport to fly to China, Miriam fell and hurt her wrist.

The two immediately flew home -- a 16-hour flight (8,065 miles) to Newark Airport -- landing at 5 p.m. on a Thursday. Miriam told Wah she was all right, so Wah watched the last half of Julie's semifinal game on TV, drove back to Newark and caught the midnight flight back to Shanghai, another 15 hours and 7,381 miles, landing on Friday and catching a three-hour connection to Harbin. He arrived in time to see Julie record two assists and Team USA defeat Canada 4-1 in the gold medal game.

What Wah didn't know was that Miriam's wrist was broken in the fall, and while he was watching Julie in Harbin, Miriam was having surgery to insert five screws in her wrist.

"We didn't know it was broken, we thought it was just a sprain. Miriam said she was OK, so I went back by myself," Wah said. "There was no time for jet lag."

Wah's professional life hasn't kept him from traveling. He is the vice president of professional services for Netkey, a software company in Branford, and credits his company for allowing him to take time off to travel to see Julie play. Miriam baby-sat three neighboring children over a decade to help financially.

A million miles

Just before the Winter Olympics in 2006, Wah Chu estimated that the family had traveled between 625,000 and 650,000 miles to watch Julie play hockey with the national team. With all the trips over the past three-plus years, including that whirlwind China trip, that mileage total is more than likely closing in on a million. That's almost 45 times around the entire earth.

"It's really incredible how many games they get to," Julie said. "I think my teammates know that my parents are in the hotel before I do. It's like, `There are the Chus,' and I'm like, `Where?' It's like my teammates have a bigger radar for my parents that I do.

"We always joke that my dad is going to be a travel agent one day because he loves this so much. He's always tinkering on things, giving us itineraries, telling us this is what we're going to do. When we were younger, it was cool because we didn't know any better, but now there are some times where we're like, `Dad, can't we just hang by the pool?' It's fun to see him take this and run with it."

Julie was first selected to the national team in 2000 when she was a high school senior-to-be at Choate, something that forced her to postpone her senior year. She had been elected to the class presidency, and she had to give that up, too. In 2006, she delayed her senior year at Harvard to train with Team USA. Now, at age 27 and heading into her third Olympics, the fire still burns, but admittedly, Chu is looking toward the future.

She served as an assistant coach for the University of Minnesota-Duluth in 2007-08, as the Bulldogs captured the 2008 NCAA Division I championship. She also continues to work at clinics all over the country, helping teach hockey to young women.

"It was awesome. I coached for a year after college at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and I can honestly say there were only a few days where I thought it was work. It was a lot of fun. It was a profession I can see myself getting back into," Julie said. "I'm not sure right now what I'm going to do after 2010, whether I'm going to continue playing or pack it up or whatever.

"I think I'd like to coach for a while. Be an assistant at D-1, and after a few years, I can decide if I want to move away from hockey or maybe take a different aspect of hockey, developmental or administrative. There are a lot of ways to still be involved and I want to give back to the younger girls as well. It's kind of in the blood so I want to stick around it."

And show off that Olympic tattoo.

"Mine's on the side of my foot. My sister can attest that I was a pretty big baby about it, too. I just kind of grabbed her hand and buried my face in her arm," Julie said. "When it was done, because it doesn't take very long to do rings, I was like, `OK, I can get another one,' because it wasn't so bad.

"Right now, there hasn't been any talk of additional tattoos, so ... it's funny, because my teammates keep asking me if I'd get another one. And I'm like, `Yeah, I'd get another one,' but I'd want to do something like that again with my family. I'd probably have to bribe them this time, though."